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Voting in the Oresteia offers fertile ground for reexamining the trilogy’s political themes. The staged instances of voting (Eu. 674-753) and of group deliberation (Ag. 1344-71) display debate and division of opinion. This paper will demonstrate, however, that verbal representations of group decisions consistently revert to the need for unanimity (Ag. 813-17, Eu. 985-6), among both mortals and gods. It will further argue that the trilogy closely connects unanimity with unchecked political violence.

Recent scholarship on Juvenal’s third satire has aptly demonstrated that any straightforward and earnest reading of Umbricius has to be supplemented by an appreciation of the ironies inherent in his presentation (Fruelund Jensen 1986; Braund 1996 233–6; Hardie 1998 247–51; Baines 2003 235–7).

The early books of Livy famously contain three episodes of would-be tyrants and the subsequent reaction of the Roman government. While the perpetrators, Spurius Cassius (2.41), Spurius Maelius (4.13-16), and Marcus Manlius Capitolinus (6.11-20), are all executed on the grounds of seeking regnum, the legitimacy of such violence to protect the state is challenged in all three cases.

At Odysseus’ first appearance in the Odyssey, he is still stranded on the island of Calypso.  Why, then, when he is at his most helpless and hopeless does Athena preface his introduction by calling him “σκηπτοῦχος βασιλεύς” – “sceptered king,” (5.9)?  I argue that the image of the σκῆπτρον, scepter, present through the epithet ‘σκηπτοῦχος’ is meaningful here: it communicates information about Odysseus that at times lies latent, but is never wholly lost or negated. 

Some fourteen fragments*, miscellaneous testimonia, and a few swaths of paraphrased material in Book 4 of Pausanias’ Hellados Periegesis are all that remain of the Messeniaca, a six-book epic of the Second Messenian War attributed to the 3rd century poet and Homeric scholar Rhianus.  In spite of their meagerness, however, these remains sketch the outlines of a bold attempt by Rhianus to create a national history, in epic form, for the Messenians after their liberation from Spartan rule in 369 BCE.

It is an accepted fact that there was a regeneration of learning in the Byzantine empire of the 800s into the 1000s and beyond. As part of this regeneration, the epigrams of the Greek Anthology were collected around 900 and subsequently were influential (Cameron 1993). This paper considers some letters of an important Byzantine political figure, Nikephoros Ouranos, in relation to selected epigrams from the collection.

The lex Iulia de adulteriis of 18 BCE, which for the first time made adultery a criminal offence and created a standing court, the quaestio perpetua de adulteriis, was touted by the Augustus as a return to the moral customs of the Republican past (Res gestae 8.5). However, the reform in fact represented a significant shift away from the traditional authority of the Roman paterfamilias to punish transgressions privately at his discretion and towards the legal power of the emperor to define and regulate morality on a public scale.

The aim of my paper is to explore how relations between travelling Roman officials and provincial elites were molded by the civic settings in which they took place. Although it is generally agreed that the public spaces of ancient cities were in some sense social products, generated by and generative of the power relations they framed (e.g. Laurence 2007), the role played by civic space in shaping the authority of Roman officials in the provinces has been largely neglected.

           The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which Catullus constructs space on the pages of his poems.  The importance of geography in Catullus’ Carmina is evident even to the first-time reader: Garrison’s classic The Student’s Catullus includes four pages of reference maps designed to help such a reader locate everything from Celtiberia in the west, homeland of the smiling Egnatius, to Nicea in the east, Catullus’ point of departure for his springtime travel in poem 46.  The significance of “si

This paper examines the Nautilia from Hesiod’s Works and Days (lines 618–693), and specifically the digression on Hesiod’s victory at the funeral games for Amphidamas at 646–62, within the context of ‘biographical digressions’ in Hesiodic poetry and their poetic function.